Amazon’s Silk Web browser adds new twist to old idea

Amazon has developed a new mobile Web browser called Silk that offloads some …

One of the headline features of Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet is a completely new Web browser called Silk that is designed with a "split" architecture, allowing it to offload much of the heavy lifting to Amazon's cloud computing cluster for superior browsing performance.

When the user requests a webpage in Silk, the request will be routed to Amazon's servers in the cloud. Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaSript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data.

Amazon can can take advantage of its high-bandwidth connection to the Internet backbone to retrieve individual page elements faster than the user would be able to natively on the device. Web content that is already on EC2 or S3 will obviously be right at Amazon's fingertips, further reducing the time it takes for Amazon to collect that content.

Amazon can also use its massive cloud storage infrastructure to cache enormous amounts of content that is commonly loaded by users, ensuring that it is instantly available to transmit. Amazon intends to put its machine learning expertise to use determining which pages users are likely to load so that the relevant content can be aggressively pre-cached and ready when needed.

The company's engineers say that Silk's robust server-side caching even obviates the need to cache anything locally on a device's internal storage. The cached content can be pushed first while the cloud is loading all the other content elements, reducing overall page load time.

To further reduce network overhead, individual content elements like images can be compressed as appropriate for the target form factor—based on screen size and pixel depth—to further shave down their size. Amazon can use much more aggressive compression on text and other elements than has historically been possible with standard Web technologies.

The Silk browser maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is received. This single connection to the Web is what lends Silk its name—as Amazon puts it, a single thread of silk is an "invisible and yet incredibly strong connection between two things."

The ideas behind Silk are compelling, but they aren't particularly novel. Opera has been using a similar approach for years to power the "turbo" mode of its desktop and mobile browsers. Amazon, of course, benefits from a much larger-scale cloud computing infrastructure with which to get the job done.

Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. He also told us that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users.

We asked Amazon a few questions about the privacy implications of the split browsing model. We were told that collected usage data is anonymous and stored in aggregate, thus protecting user privacy. It's also possible to completely turn off the split browsing mode and use Silk like a conventional Web browser.

Silk's split design is a good fit for the Kindle Fire, a content-focused device with tight cloud integration. The feature will likely bring completely transparent performance improvements to mobile browsing. For more details, you can watch Amazon's explanatory video.

This is why you're not going to see a 3G Kindle Fire any time soon. For one, Amazon is so proud that they offer 3G for free on their e-ink Kindles, but there's NO way they could offer free 3G on the Fire with all the video and images and other web-content. They would take a bath on all the bandwidth people would use. And yes, people would totally be dicks about using all the bandwidth they can with 3G. "Hey, I'm entitled!".

I think they're just bypassing that whole quagmire with not even offering the Fire with 3G at this time. Download e-books which are basically all text through 3G is fine with them though.

The kindles are getting more and more attractive. If they could bring this Silk browser to the eInk models then I'd be tempted to get the new touch model to replace my 2y/o generic $120 android tablet that I keep plugged in next to bed so I can surf & read when I can't sleep.

I still think they should have some sort of deal where you can "rent" the ebook version of any books you've purchased through them for a few weeks for super cheap (<$1). I dont want to spend $8-10 for a permanent copy of an ebook. that's what hardcovers are for. Give me the option to include the ebook for an extra $1-2.

What about RIM / blackberry? I remember they used to do something (not quite this, but at least in part with the image re sizing and whatnot). Either way, very compelling product, I like it conceptually a lot.

Color me skeptical that this is really about performance. I'll grant you, there probably _is_ a performance improvement relative to a vanilla web browser, but the real strategic play here is real-time, universal tracking. By funneling the entire browsing experience through Amazon's servers, Amazon will have an immediate and immense store of user behavior that vastly exceeds what can be done with a traditional cookie architecture. Whatever their claims are about "aggregate" behavior, the fact remains that the system is, by design, a massive apparatus for doing deep packet inspection on millions of users concurrently, and injecting new "optimized" content into the browsing experience.

What's a little surprising is how up-front Amazon is being about all of this. By convincing customers that their current tablet browsing experience is too slow (which I don't agree with, even on an iPad 1), they're hoping to get millions of customers to opt-in to persistent tracking. Nice work if you can get it.

I'm glad you asked about privacy, Ryan. I'm not sure I trust anyone with my browsing history, but at least Amazon is talking aggregation. Will Silk function like a proxy server or expose the user's wi-fi/ISP info?

I wonder if the people at Google are thinking about how much sweet data Amazon is going to collect because they didn't think of this first.

What about handling secure (https) connections?We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com).

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

Interesting how the tightly-integrated hardware/software stack allows incentives for Amazon to implement the global caching solution. Google already has the entire web in RAM, but without hardware profit it's harder for them to justify the additional cost of doing something like this for generic Android. They make so much money off tracking & data, though, that perhaps it would still be worth it to them (?)

If the tracking data is that valuable, then I suppose Amazon could release Silk as a general Android app for any device.

The Danger Hiptop did something like this as well, and I think the original Sidekick came out long before Opera Mini. But being the first to an area doesn't mean they actually did it that well (and in the case of the Hiptop, their implementation was HORRIBLE).

Amazon will have an immediate and immense store of user behavior that vastly exceeds what can be done with a traditional cookie architecture. .

Exactly.. however, google cloud/network components in Android os is sort of how the template for that was enabled, so this isnt new, All cloud-based systems siphons your data request stream anyhow.,, they have to detect performance load balancing etc... Its important to remind people , as you did, that CLOUD services are not the same as good old interweb stateless anonymity. You give up a lot to get this... but

What Amazon/silk is offering is really a CDN just for you. I deal with high-performance CDN services a lot, and it matters, works great, and its a great benefit to UXE to have a CDN ( content delivery network ) on your beckoning call. Amazon CDN is good, but your mileage may vary.

Color me skeptical that this is really about performance. I'll grant you, there probably _is_ a performance improvement relative to a vanilla web browser, but the real strategic play here is real-time, universal tracking. By funneling the entire browsing experience through Amazon's servers, Amazon will have an immediate and immense store of user behavior that vastly exceeds what can be done with a traditional cookie architecture. Whatever their claims are about "aggregate" behavior, the fact remains that the system is, by design, a massive apparatus for doing deep packet inspection on millions of users concurrently, and injecting new "optimized" content into the browsing experience.

What's a little surprising is how up-front Amazon is being about all of this. By convincing customers that their current tablet browsing experience is too slow (which I don't agree with, even on an iPad 1), they're hoping to get millions of customers to opt-in to persistent tracking. Nice work if you can get it.

I agree. I'm highly skeptical about their motives for this. There are obviously tons of privacy concerns with your entire web history being funneled through one server (that can track you down to your Amazon account tied to the Kindle). I'm wondering how long it is before Amazon's front page starts offering tiny Japanese figurines to a user due his unusual interest in videos containing scantly clad Asian midgets...

What about handling secure (https) connections?We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com).

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

Thanks for finding this.... Hey Ars... do a writeup on this! This is a really huge deal that fundamentally breaks web security. Essentially, this is a man-in-the-middle attack that's authorized by their terms-of-service. Since the SSL connection is between "the cloud" and the website you're connecting to, this allows Amazon's servers to "optimize" secure content. Ordinary deep packet inspection can't do this, since SSL is set up to thwart exactly this behavior. There's all sorts of interesting behavior going on behind SSL connections; email, e-commerce, banking. Amazon will have quite the little database.

This is a shockingly awful idea, but props to Amazon for the cajones do deploy such a thing under the guise of a consumer benefit.

Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side

Hmm, all modern JS engines compile to machine code these days. Is the new bit here that an x86 server cross-compiles to ARM, then sends that to the ARM tablet to be run locally? (Do we even know for sure that these servers are x86?)

What about handling secure (https) connections?We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com).

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

Thanks for finding this.... Hey Ars... do a writeup on this! This is a really huge deal that fundamentally breaks web security. Essentially, this is a man-in-the-middle attack that's authorized by their terms-of-service. Since the SSL connection is between "the cloud" and the website you're connecting to, this allows Amazon's servers to "optimize" secure content. Ordinary deep packet inspection can't do this, since SSL is set up to thwart exactly this behavior. There's all sorts of interesting behavior going on behind SSL connections; email, e-commerce, banking. Amazon will have quite the little database.

This is a shockingly awful idea, but props to Amazon for the cajones do deploy such a thing under the guise of a consumer benefit.

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Those two quoted sections don't make much sense to me. How can they create a "direct connection" between the device and the site when they've already said they establish a "secure connection" from the cloud server to the site for the purpose of "page requests"? There ain't nothing direct nor secure that I see here.

This isn't even invented by Opera. This is just Web Prefetch and is a part of many many WAN Acceleration/Optimization schemes out there. If you've ever used Satellite internet, it's done something essentially like this. It helps overcome the Chatty nature of TCP.

The kindles are getting more and more attractive. If they could bring this Silk browser to the eInk models then I'd be tempted to get the new touch model to replace my 2y/o generic $120 android tablet that I keep plugged in next to bed so I can surf & read when I can't sleep.

I still think they should have some sort of deal where you can "rent" the ebook version of any books you've purchased through them for a few weeks for super cheap (<$1). I dont want to spend $8-10 for a permanent copy of an ebook. that's what hardcovers are for. Give me the option to include the ebook for an extra $1-2.

I like the idea of renting ebooks as well. Our local library gives you that ability to rent an ebook for a few weeks, but Amazon has a much larger collection and it would be nice to have that same functionality provided through them.

What about handling secure (https) connections?We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com).

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

My knee-jerk reaction is that this "web browser in the cloud" concept is terrible idea. It breaks the end-to-end design principal of the Internet and introduces a host of security and robustness issues (what happens when amazon's cloud service isn't available? what if it is caching data that shouldn't be cached, so you see the old version of a page?). You might as well just run the web browser over a remote desktop session.

It would probably take something pretty apocalyptically serious to completely knock out Amazon's Cloud. Back in 2009 they were running over 40,000 servers for it and it's safe to assume that that capacity has only risen since then,

I wonder be used by people in countries that restrict internet access. Instead of connecting to a forbidden website directly, a user in China or somewhere could connect to a rendering service like this and request the data from that website. It would probably have to be encrypted or something to keep the content filters away from it.

It would probably take something pretty apocalyptically serious to completely knock out Amazon's Cloud. Back in 2009 they were running over 40,000 servers for it and it's safe to assume that that capacity has only risen since then,

Well, you don't have to knock out the whole thing, just the part that happens to handle your particular account credentials. Alternately, what if you're on an internal network, and your site's internet connection goes down? You might still have internal web pages that you need to access. (Assuming those pages are accessible by the cloud service in the first place). It's unclear whether "Silk" is capable of loading and rendering web pages on its own.